Political Discourse and Literature: Involvement, Conformity, Con- frontation In Slovak Prose of 1948 – 1956

Abstract

The study is aimed at presenting a relation between political discourse and literature. It is based on Michael Foucault’s works on discourse and its connection to power. The author concentrates on two parts of a discursive field: political discourse and artistic literature. Unlike Foucault´s analyses of obscure and hidden dispersion of power, the author of the study pays attention to an extreme case, when a state ideological apparatus openly pushes forward interests of the political power through literature. The author´s starting point is the case of the Slovak literature in 1948 after totalitarian communist regime onset. He observes a servile function of art in Slovak prose, particularly in the works written in early 1950´s by Dominik Tatarka, a famous Slovak writer. The author lays stress on a counterproductive effect of the pressure of power on literature, which resulted in literary production not only without an aesthetic value but also without a required ideological impact on a society.